The invention concerns a method for determining data for treating a surface, and in particular to a method for adapting a reflective surface to a desired surface.
When treating the cornea of an eye, usually the refractive behavior of the cornea is determined in order to subsequently, in most cases by means of a laser method, subject the cornea to laser treatment so as to change the curvature and thus the refractive behavior of the cornea. In thus it is possible, by means of subjecting the cornea to a few targeted "exposures", to achieve a structural change of the cornea in certain regions of the remove parts of the cornea. In particular by radially different intensity of the laser treatment, the refractive behavior of the surface of the cornea is thus changed.
It has however been shown that usually the refractive behavior of the cornea is not uniform across its entire surface and consequently the known procedures produce a good result only in the case of refractive behavior distributed at adequate similarity across the cornea. With the known treatment methods, smaller areas of the cornea of particularly high or particularly low curvature are not corrected at all or only inadequately corrected.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,669,466 and 5,384,608 describe methods in which spatial co-ordinates of a multiple number of points on a surface are determined and entered as a data record in a computer in which also the form and shape of a desired surface is recorded. For the multiple number of points on the surface, the spacing to the desired surface is calculated, and the spatial co-ordinates and the spacings of the multiple number of points is outputted as a data record for adapting the surface.
These known methods determine a desired surface and try to treat the surface in such a way as to eliminate the differences to the desired surface. It is however problematic that for a surface of any given form, it is impossible to unambiguously determine a desired surface. An optimal desired surface can only be determined if the spacings to the surface are known.